Modern networking continues to provide an improvement in communication and information access. As an example, in-house data centers, associated with a particular entity of interrelated group of users, could contain a large number of information technology (IT) resources that are interconnected through a network. These networks are configured in different ways depending on implementation-specific details such as the hardware used and the physical location of the equipment, and depending on the particular objectives of the network. One common type of network configuration is a local area network (LAN). In actual practice, a typical LAN will include large numbers of computer systems and switches (as well as other devices). Devices such as computer systems, routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, and the like, are commonly linked to each other in networks.
In one embodiment, a LAN is established and/or managed by having a technician physically connecting devices according to a network plan. That is, when a plurality of resources is to be used in a network, the technician will connect the devices physically and install the correct software into the devices by hand. Each time a modification to the network or software is necessary, the technicians must manually connect or disconnect the devices or manually install or change the software to perform the modification.
To resolve the manual modification process, many modern networks also have in-house data centers that include technicians working from a network operation center (NOC). The technicians issue commands to control the deployment of servers and to control the supporting infrastructures, such as disk logical units (LUNs) in a disk array, network switches in the LAN, and the like.
Although a NOC is used in the present in-house data centers to control the network, there are still manual requirements for interaction with components within the network during start up of a resource, new installation of a resource, or the like. For example, in order to introduce new servers into the LAN and capitalize on the dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) and/or the bootstrap protocol services, a technician is required to manually enter and configure the options for each server in advance of it being utilized by the DCHP databases to netboot the system.
However, requiring a technician to physically interact directly with the servers for configuration within the network is labor intense and error prone. In other words, due to the manual configuration requirement, the technician must be capable of physically reaching and interacting with each server in the network. This technical effort is time consuming and labor intense when a few servers are part of the network and it becomes extremely impractical and time consuming when adding hundreds of server systems onto the network. The problem is even more deleterious in a utility computing environment wherein the resources within the network are virtually allocated and reallocated from one client to another. That is, since the reallocation process inevitably involves one or more reboot cycles, due to varying client system configurations (e.g., custom boot images and data volumes) each reboot and system reconfiguration would result in the technician having to again manually interacting with the allocated servers during each boot process.